1980 Pennsylvania Lottery Scandal - Planning The Conspiracy

Planning The Conspiracy

The plan was masterminded by Nick Perry (1916–2003), the announcer of the Daily Number. Perry was born Nicholas Pericles Katsafanas in the Morningside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended Peabody High School and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Perry began a career as a radio broadcaster in Charleston, West Virginia, then entered early television broadcasting on Pittsburgh’s WDTV, the forerunner of KDKA-TV. Perry switched to the WTAE-TV television station in Pittsburgh in 1958 working as a staff announcer. Later, he became a news and weather reporter and was the host of local sports shows like Bowling for Dollars and Championship Bowling. In 1977, Perry became the host of the live nightly broadcast of the Pennsylvania Lottery, held in the studios of WTAE.

Perry first discussed his idea with two of his business partners whom he worked with in the vending business, brothers Peter Maragos and Jack Maragos. Once committed to the plan, Perry approached local Pittsburgh lettering expert and WTAE art director Joseph Bock about creating weighted ping-pong balls that were replicas of the official balls used in the lottery machines. Bock agreed to help, and experimented with powder and other substances until he settled on white latex paint. Bock performed careful experiments to determine just the right amount of paint to use so that the weighted balls could fly up off the bottom of the machine, but not high enough to reach the vacuum tube so the ball would be drawn out of the machine. The men thought it would be too risky to weight nine of the ten balls for each machine, so they decided to leave both the 4 and 6 balls unchanged. Those would be the only balls light enough to actually be drawn. This would reduce the number of possible combinations to eight: 444, 446, 464, 466, 644, 646, 664, and 666. Bock then applied labels on the balls (obtained from an art supply store) that matched those of the originals.

Perry received access to the machines and ping pong balls through the involvement of Edward Plevel, a lottery official. Plevel left the machines and balls unguarded for several minutes on a few occasions. Perry also got WTAE stagehand Fred Luman to actually switch the original balls with the weighted ones before and after the drawing. Bock then took the rigged balls back to his studio and burned them in a paint can a half-hour after the on-air drawing was done.